The Funder's Checklist: Five Questions Your Impact Report Must Answer
Before a funding committee reads your headline number, its analyst has five questions. Answer them in the report and the number survives.
Who actually reads your impact report
Not the committee. The committee reads the cover letter and the headline number. The report itself is read by an analyst whose job is to decide whether that number can be trusted, and the analyst works from a short and predictable list of questions. Non-profits and arts organizations that answer those questions inside the document get a very different reception from those that leave them for the question period.
What would have happened without you?
This is the counterfactual, and it is the question most reports skip. If your festival had not run, would the visitors have stayed home, or would they have spent the same money at a restaurant across town? Activity that would have happened anyway is displaced, not created. State the share of your audience that came from outside the region and the share that would not otherwise have spent locally. A conservative estimate you can defend is worth more than a generous one you cannot.
Whose money is it?
Keep three things clearly separate: the money your organization spent, the money your audience spent because of you, and the money that recirculated through suppliers and wages. Funders care most about the second. A report that blends the three into a single "total impact" figure invites the analyst to assume the worst about all of them.
What is the unit?
"Supports 42 jobs" means nothing until the reader knows what a job is. Full-time equivalents, person-years and headcount can differ by a factor of three for the same activity. Choose one unit, define it in a footnote, and use it consistently throughout. For seasonal and project-based work, job-years are usually the honest choice.
Where do the multipliers come from?
Statistics Canada publishes input-output multipliers by province and by industry. Use them and cite the table. If you apply a custom or sub-provincial multiplier, explain why in a sentence a non-economist can follow. A multiplier with no source reads as a guess, because it usually is one.
Can you produce this number again next year?
Funders fund programs, not one-off studies, so show that the model is reusable. Say which inputs you collect routinely, such as ticket sales, audience postal codes and supplier invoices, which you survey annually, and how long it takes to refresh the figure. A model built in a spreadsheet the organization owns, with its assumptions documented, is worth more to a funder than a glossier number that nobody can reproduce.
The report that survives
Answer these five questions in the body of the report rather than the appendix, and put the assumptions where the analyst will look for them. The headline number will be smaller than the one you could have claimed. It will also be the one the committee believes, and the one you can defend when a councillor or a journalist asks the follow-up question.